Revealing the research themes and trends in Knowledge Management studies

Abstract

Knowledge management (KM) has come to encompass a wide range of studies. It is also a new discipline with great growth potential since knowledge acquisition and assimilation has become one of the most important ingredients in modern business practice. KM-related research within science and engineering could help provide the theoretical and infrastructural support that is needed by practitioners and researchers in this new field. The study of the intellectual structure of a discipline was pioneered by researchers in information science in the early eighties. The intellectual structure of KM had been studied earlier by researchers in the information systems (IS) field. The finding of IS researchers is idiosyncratically inclined toward IS related research. Our study draws on the CiteSeer citation index, which is primarily a computer engineering and information science citation database. The intellectual structure of KM derived from a predominantly science and engineering oriented index is quite different from what has been provided by IS researchers. Our results reveal sub areas that appear to form the conceptual groundwork of KM. Besides, these current research themes of KM were also explored, further identifying research trends in KM. It was found that the study of semantic based peer-to-peer computing is one of the most important of these trends.